Golem or Post-human? Trans-humanism from a Non-human Perspectiv

Abstract

The article is a confrontation of trans-humanist ideas with literary visions of postulates and promises formulated by the supporters of auto-revolution in order to verify the effectiveness of prescriptions given by post-human society to deal with human problems. The figure of Golem, making ambiguous the boundary between the human and non-human, allows toexamine the existing definitions of humanity and how they are used in a discourse focused on the vision of the future of man. Golem, a humanoid creature endowed with an animalistic soul (nephesz), embodies avariety of non-human entities which – in the intentions of their creators – were to be an improved version of the human. From Victor Frankenstein’s monster and robots made by Rossum to cyborgs and residents of future utopias, Golem reflects human fears and desires.Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel written at the dawn of Early Modernity and deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy and the realities of the Industrial Revolution,can serve as a starting point for reflection on the American trans-humanism. For it isa narrative which shows how a scientific utopia and the myth of progress were defeated when confronted by the social problems in the novel related to the birth of the proletariat (the French Revolution, social reforms). The polemics with trans-humanists’ ideals also includes the twentieth-century literature. Literary diagnoses of post-human condition were formulated among other things from the social and economic perspectives. The works of such writers as Karel Čapek, Aldous Huxley and Greg Egan allow to question three trans-humanist myths: the myth of rationality, the myth of equality and the myth of humanity. These myths are based on the assumptions which are included in the trans-humanist concepts and simultaneously pre-determine defining and assessing such categories as rationality, the body and the human.